Common Sense be Damned
by Dark Hope Assassin
Summary: When dealing with Haruhi Suzumiya one had to get used to the taste of defeat. /Kyon x Haruhi/


_Written for the 1sentence LJ community, theme set Beta._

* * *

**#01 – Walking;**

Ever since (unwittingly, he tried to convince himself every day of his suddenly turned nightmarish school-life) he'd become involved with her, Kyon didn't even doubt for a moment that if someone could make even something as mundane as walking twisted and some sort of adventure, it was Haruhi Suzumiya, weirdo extraordinaire.

**#02 – Waltz;**

He really shouldn't have been surprised at her prowess in dancing, since she'd proved time and again that there are very few things she _cannot_ do, but still, seeing her spinning Nagato around so gracefully as she taught the bespectacled girl the steps to the waltz felt somehow unreal and provoked feelings deep in his chest he could never put into words even if he tried to.

**#03 – Wishes;**

The SOS Brigade was created for the sake of fulfilling her every single selfish wish, it became painfully apparent every time she came up with some insane idea, but Kyon was sure that even without all of them trying as hard to keep her pleased—if what Itsuki said was true, that was—she'd be able to shape the world into whatever would please her whimsical nature in the blink of an eye and he can't help but think that at least two out of three people in the world would _kill_ to have the power to make all their wishes come true through their own strength the way she can.

**#04 – Wonder;**

Every time she drags him across the halls by his collar fisted in her hand or by the scruff of his neck he can't help but wonder just _what_ that head of hers had come up with now and just how much it would shorten his lifespan.

**#05 – Worry;**

When Asahina-san frets over the fact that Haruhi hasn't shown up in the club room for two days in a row without anything happening before that to trigger her absence, Kyon waves it off and says she's probably off somewhere, up to no good; when the days turn into nearly a whole week it is not Asahina-san but Kyon himself who goes to visit the Suzumiya residence (although he'd never admit even under threat of torture that he'd been worried about that troublemaker) to find to his utmost surprise that evidently even someone as hyperactive as Haruhi Suzumiya was susceptible to catching colds.

**#06 – Whimsy;**

He wondered when it was that he stopped frowning upon each and every selfish whimsy she threw their way, expecting her wishes be fulfilled the moment she dished them out, and instead started looking forward to that beaming bright smile she'd have after the SOS Brigade did her bidding; when he did notice it for a fact though he thought this must be a sure sign of him losing his mind.

**#07 – Waste/Wasteland;**

It was really taxing on the common sense to believe that such a (deceptively) frail-looking, tiny-statured girl like Haruhi could level a whole city (not to mention the entire world) and leave only ruins in her wake if she so wished.

**#08 – Whiskey and Rum;**

He'd wondered for a while what would happen if someone as hyperactive as her drunk alcohol—was there any way she could be more of a natural disaster than she already was?—and discovered a bit too soon—to his personal chagrin—that he should never let hard alcohol and Haruhi mix (_ever_ again), unless he wanted there to really be casualties to her intoxicated insanity.

**#09 – War;**

Being at Haruhi's side meant being the voice of common sense and constantly at war with the outrageousness of her ideas; every day was trying and, just like at war, there were some battles that he won and some that he didn't.

**#10 – Weddings;**

When Asahina-san says that every little girl has dreamt of a white wedding with lots of beautiful fragrant flowers and a wonderful Prince Charming waiting for her at the altar, Kyon can't stop his gaze from fluttering briefly in direction of the completely engrossed in her scribbling of something on a piece of paper Haruhi and wondering whether, for once, the term "every girl" actually expanded to include the hyperactive tomboy as well.

**#11 – Birthday;**

He's seen her student ID so he dreads the coming of this day, not even daring to ponder what kind of overactive insanity she'd come up for her personal celebration only to have Haruhi—much to his complete surprise—never even mention the fact that it was her birthday that day, acting just like she does like the rest of the 364 days every year; this—for some _inane_ reason that he can't put his finger on—doesn't sit well with him at all so for the first time he's the instigator of something within the club, organizing the SOS Brigade to throw her a low-key kind of belated birthday party that on any other day his mind would tell him she does not deserve for all the hell she puts all of them through.

**#12 – Blessing;**

Even after all her complaining about it and him thinking the entire time he'd snap any moment, the private smile Haruhi wears when she thinks no one is looking at her during the surprise birthday party they'd thrown her feels what he believes a goddess' blessing over their hard work would—and Kyon promptly feels like slapping himself repeatedly after the thought crossed his mind because it was yet another sign that he must be going just as insane as she was for thinking such idiocies.

**#13 – Bias;**

He wonders whether his strange kind of bias in preferring seeing Asahina-san strip down to her undergarments to having Haruhi do the same stems from the fact she'd done that one too many times in the classroom before he'd (grudgingly) come to be one of her lackeys.

**#14 – Burning;**

He always knows to brace for the worst when she comes barging into the club room, her pose straightened like a chord and a burning gleam in her eyes before she announces what kind of feat she's planning to make him and their fellow club members suffer through _this_ time…

**#15 – Breathing;**

Contrary to all the common sense he so prides himself in having lots of, he is taken aback when he enters the room and finds her hunched over a desk, her soft breathing and the slow rise and fall of her ribcage giving away the fact she was indeed asleep—he's so used to having her bouncing around and relentlessly ordering everybody to do this or that that he'd almost thought her to be invincible to fatigue and exhaustion, as if she had some kind of endless energy reserve.

**#16 – Breaking;**

He'd thought he'd be able to break free from this leash she'd put on him when they graduated from high school… only to discover that the entire SOS Brigade had made it into his university of choice and that he was probably doomed to be part of this troupe until his dying breath.

**#17 – Belief;**

When she leaves him in charge of organizing her latest imbecility of a notion while she goes to make sure they have terrain secured to execute her plan, he wonders just where that trust of hers for him stems from since he never did anything to encourage it… but he still sighs in resignation and does as she has asked because—he reasons logically—she'd never let him hear the end of it if he betrayed that trust.

**#18 – Balloon;**

He always says he'd hate to burst her bubble when she has another insane idea he's ready to shoot down but it doesn't take a genius to figure out he's always lying through his teeth.

**#19 – Balcony;**

When they're on a balcony some dozen meters off the ground during a vacation on the beach (as per Haruhi's insistence that the city was becoming simply unbearable at this time of the year) and Haruhi is being overenthusiastic as usual, reclining dangerously over the ledge of the balcony, he reasons that the jab of unease he feels at the time is simply because she's a classmate, that he wouldn't be able to bear seeing her fall from such a height and that that's all there is to it—and he's irked at how untrue the explanation sounds to his own ears.

**#20 – Bane;**

He perceives her as the bane of his existence but when he looks back on his high school days it is with a fond smile because he wouldn't have been able to have so many wacky memories to go back to if not for her intervention in his life.

**#21 – Quiet;**

It doesn't take him long into his acquaintance with her to notice she seems to have an intolerance for peace and quiet and thinks it wouldn't take him long to shake her off, since he's an individual that values his peace of mind highly; it's only much, much later in time that she manages to somewhat convert him to her restless ways and has him believe that maybe, just maybe, quiet wasn't too great a price to pay in exchange for having her around.

**#22 – Quirks;**

She'd had the habit of tugging him along with her by his necktie (nearly strangling him every time) and it seemed she found it even more useful later in time, when she could pull him down to her eye level whenever she felt like kissing him; it was this newly acquired habit of hers that should've proven to him that her selfishness was limitless but it was difficult to notice such things when he didn't exactly dislike that new quirk of hers (or the feel of her lips on his).

**#23 – Question;**

"Do you want to be my girlfriend?" is a question that he'd never ask in a million years for a multitude of reasons but instead he invites her out every now and then under pretext of having found something interesting in town that she might like; he finds it rather curious that even though they never do anything exactly special—they don't meet any aliens, time-travellers, espers or other freaks of nature—during their outings, she never complains and she always has that huge, sun-eclipsing grin splitting her face when they part ways on the street that leads to her house.

**#24 – Quarrel;**

Her voice is shrill enough in her excitement that it's almost a nightmare when she yells at him in her ire and he finds himself wondering with dangerously increasing frequency whether she'd throttle him if he dared kiss her to shut her up one of these days.

**#25 – Quitting;**

He is somewhat amazed at her resilience, even when faced with the odds of something stacking up against her and ponders to himself whether she is even familiar with the concept of quitting.

**#26 – Jump;**

He reminded her every once in a while that people have said for a reason, "Look before you leap;" usually, she ignores him when he does, but one day she gives him a stern look and asks whether he plans to live his life conscious of each and every step he makes, and that even if he planned to live that way, she didn't, because that just wouldn't be any fun—he'd been so baffled by her response that he hadn't been able to refute her argument at the time, even though he had plenty in mind to say to that, but later he can't help but consider it – if Alice had thought seriously about jumping down that rabbit hole, the world today wouldn't have the masterpiece that her adventures are to a reader.

**#27 – Jester;**

He infallibly feels like the palace jester before his whimsical queen's scrutiny when she says with a firm frown induced by boredom and a severe look in her eyes when she imperiously says, "Entertain me!"

**#28 – Jousting;**

Kyon just can't wrap his mind around this inexplicable desire of hers to take part in any and all competitions that are brought to her knowledge, and finds even more confusing her desire to always, _always_ be victorious—does she not realize that, when you are so bent on taking part in so many competitions of such a wide variety, there are times when you _will_ lose to someone better than you, someone who's being doing that for longer?—but what he finds the most baffling of all is his constant attempts to soften the blow to her already overlarge ego when the SOS Brigade loses to anyone else and reasons with himself that he's only doing it because the fate of the whole world is at stake.

**#29 – Jewel;**

He's never seen her wear any so he realizes that buying her jewelry from the latest trip his family takes was idiotic of him and is genuinely surprised by her sour mood when he gives the necklace to Asahina-san; "Could it be… you wanted it?" is what he asks her afterwards and her vehement denial only confirms it better than anything else she might have said.

**#30 – Just;**

So what if the sex was great—it was just a temporary escape.

**#31 – Smirk;**

From the minute that he saw it, he knew it spelled trouble, that smirk of hers—it had come to mean that nothing good would come of what that disturbed mind of hers was plotting that same moment and that the fate of the world might once again rest on four pairs of shoulders, depending on whether or not they could comply with whatever that smirk of hers meant well enough to leave her pleased or not.

**#32 – Sorrow;**

Looking back on those days many years later, he thinks he should have considered her quite a merciful god for the only sorrow her followers ever endured back in the day was the hellish regimen her bipolar personality enforced—it was as if their closeness to her had ensured that everything would be okay with them and their families; it is only after they leave from under her wing that they encounter harshness of the real world around them, filled with daily strife and hardships.

**#33 – Stupidity;**

The pointlessness of each and every one of her ideas left him with no choice but to believe she was a complete moron but it was difficult to see truth in that notion when she spoke of theories and facts that no moron would be able to comprehend, and it is during those rare epiphanies on her part that he wonders why someone like her who actually has a good head on their shoulders would cling to stupidity all the time.

**#34 – Serenade;**

She should've known that there were some things people wouldn't do even if she tried to extort them into it, and having him sing her songs and buy her flowers was definitely one of them; the fact he somehow—masochistically—still wanted to be with her despite what his common sense dictated him to do wouldn't change because of the lack of romanticism in their awkward relationship-but-not-quite.

**#35 – Sarcasm;**

Sarcasm is his best weapon against her idiocy and farfetched logic but it's all kind of pointless if she even refuses to listen, isn't it?

**#36 – Sordid;**

When she couldn't get what she wanted through normal measures, she never hesitated to resort to sordid ones; he'd always found that characteristic of hers largely alarming because he could never know when she'd decide to use it against him too.

**#37 – Soliloquy;**

He quickly discovered that besides her vast array of talents, she had the knack of turning even the most smoothly flowing of conversations into monologues and infallibly managed to bark out all her expectations from her brigade members in such a manner that crippled any chance of further discussion on the topic—should he, he often wondered sarcastically—consider this another instance of her godliness?

**#38 – Sojourn;**

He'd spent so many hours of his life in that room that he couldn't help the jab of nostalgia on the day of his graduation when he closes the door to the club room for the very last time, recalling with a tiny, wistful smile all the hectic but without a doubt endlessly eventful days he'd spent as part of the brigade that had used the premise and the brigade chief whose enthusiasm never flagged.

**#39 – Share;**

He knows for a fact that she is completely self-centered and maybe in a tiny part of her head she _does_ believe that the world revolves around her, so he is taken a bit aback when she starts sharing a snack or another with him, something he'd thought her completely incapable of doing and is wary of this change in heart, wondering where the catch is.

**#40 – Solitary;**

The closed spaces are solitary places, where there was no one in sight for miles and miles, it seemed, and he recalls pondering once, before going to sleep one night, whether they were a projection of what her heart felt like during her moments of loneliness, melancholy or frustration, whether she sealed herself off in a solitary world of her own where no one can reach her; before he permanently cuts off that train of thought, he also remembers feeling a stab of something he couldn't name at the time at the notion of having her change even slightly from the hyperactive, goofy Haruhi he'd grown used to having bouncing around.

**#41 – Nowhere;**

He officially brands himself insane in his own head when the notion of having himself and Haruhi Suzumiya stuck in the middle of nowhere (where there would be _no interruptions_ and _no one_ walking in on them) doesn't sound like such a bad idea after all.

**#42 – Neutral;**

When he drags her away from a trainee whom she is (shamelessly) flirting with (and thus trying to con into letting the SOS Brigade into getting in the amusement park for free) she demands to know just 'what the hell his problem is' with an indignantly imperative tone and he is somewhat surprised that he manages to keep a neutral expression when he tells her he doesn't like having her flirt with guys for her own selfish goals; he thinks he may have stepped over the invisible boundaries when she frowns, crosses her arms over her chest, huffs and walks away without another word but when she acts like nothing ever happened the next day he comes to the conclusion that, while she may not appreciate him trying to "limit" her freedom, she doesn't think that having him act his part (which he can't exactly pin a label to: was he her boyfriend? Lover? Plaything? Slave? He really didn't have an idea anymore…) is being over the line.

**#43 – Nuance;**

Haruhi had a whole troupe of weird folks catering to her every whim, at her constant beck and call, yet he is always the one who notices the ever so subtle changes in her mood and tone, and sees the coming of a storm even before the proverbial calms before it.

**#44 – Near;**

He used to think that whenever she is near him his whole being switched instinctively on the defensive; he later discovers that it's all a matter of a mindset because, however much he hates it when she keeps bossing him around (he was a fool to believe she would be any different just because they had become intimate), it is only when she's so near him that he can practically feel only her that he can truly be at peace with the world around him.

**#45 – Natural;**

She seemed to be a natural at practically anything she tried out so he shouldn't have been so surprised that even though it was her first time doing this kind of thing, she made his head roll back and his eyes slide shut in bliss while she proceeded to show him a world he'd never known existed before; that's about the time that he realized that having an experiment-prone willful girlfriend/lover/slave-driver/whatevershewastohim could be a damn good thing.

**#46 – Horizon;**

As a teenager, Kyon used to think of her as the out of touch with reality girl who knows no propriety and has no sense of boundaries and is thus just like the horizon—always too far away and just out of reach, the one whom no matter how far you chased you'd never catch up to or touch; as a young man, Kyon knows that only the vastness of her inexhaustible imagination is comparable with the endlessness of the horizon (he thinks one day while watching the sun rise out the window, the first rays of light bathing in their warmth his bare torso and the naked still sound asleep Haruhi curled under the bed sheets by his side).

**#47 – Valiant;**

He can never be her knight in shining armour, not because he doesn't have the valiance (though there was that as well) but rather because she didn't need nor want one—she was an assertive young woman never afraid to say whatever she wanted and always ready to achieve whatever she needed through her own power; no, she didn't have a use for a valiant hero but she could use a devoted follower who could do her bidding without questioning her and rebelling against her too much, someone who did not judge her and was ready to go to the ends of earth with her without making too much of a fuss about it.

**#48 – Virtuous;**

He didn't use to think so but virtue, Kyon discovers after getting to know her, is truly a strange thing—it can be possessed even by the most brazen and shameless of individuals such as Haruhi in even the most demure of forms, like it did with her: while she never hesitated to blackmail people into complying with her desires, she never used underhand means to win in the countless jousts she took part in, because then it wouldn't feel like her victory at all.

**#49 – Victory;**

Haruhi Suzumiya was definitely not one of the people who believed that it's taking part that counts and the SOS Brigade learnt that the hard way.

**#50 – Defeat;**

When dealing with Haruhi Suzumiya one had to get used to the taste of defeat because there was no way she'd back down from an argument or comply with anyone else's wishes unless it suited her whim, which was why Kyon had been on the receiving end of lots of losses since becoming a member of her club and a lackey of hers; the only time he had been glad to have been easily overpowered by her was when she had decided that it was him she'd wanted to conquer.

* * *

_A/N:_ I should say now that I'm probably not very good at portraying these characters because this is my first time writing them and I feel really insecure about the characterization. But if I succeeded in making you crack a smile or two, I'd definitely be pleased with my work. :3 Also, I just had to add that sentence as #30 – it was to honour the song that inspired me and gave me the confidence to do this challenge. :3


End file.
